Crypto lenders can watch every transaction, but that doesn’t tell them whether the loans, the protocol or the vault itself are safe. S&P Global Ratings is now offering a structured way to assess those risks.

Its Vault Risk Assessment, or VRA, launched on Oct. 4, 2026, is a forward-looking opinion about the relative risk that an investor’s position in a digital asset lending vault could suffer impairment.

It is a framework, however, rather than a set of published grades. S&P hasn’t assessed a vault yet.

What a Crypto Lending Vault Does

A lending vault pools deposits and deploys them through a defined strategy. Those strategies can run automatically through smart contracts, be managed by people, or combine both approaches.

Depositors…